I think I like yours better!! He looks awesome!!
Really LOVE the tail!!
The thing I have found with the scale mat on the dragon is that it stretches way too much ont he tail and face areas for the details to be all that good. You can solve it with a seamless tile, but again you lose the detail there. Alt UV map for the tail might be an option, but still fiddling around a bit.

Click to expand...

I didn't notice this part of your message before. The only kind of morphs I seem to do are super extreme morphs. I always use the default uvs, because Poser doesn't yet support alt uvs, and I like to supply Studio and Poser versions of my products. The way I overcome texel stretching is to texture in a 3d painter, or to make alt uvs, texture on them, then bake the texture back out onto the original uv.

I worked on my griffin a little bit waiting for a promo to render...

One thing I've noticed about putting the dragon on the big cat mesh that will almost certainly garner criticism is this:

It's rather difficult to get long, slender toes on it, and I'm fairly certain they won't bend satisfactorily without some fierce JCMs and some posing morphs. Some webbing between the toes will be unavoidable.

Perhaps the dragon should have some conforming/geografted feet that come with it as an option?

It may be that Chris will end up changing the dragon into a separate entity like he did with the horse and the cat Sparky. I'm not sure what their plans are but it would make sense if there are issues with leaving it as a morph.

I'm a dragon person so of course want this one but I've been looking for a decent Griffin even more!
I can't see anything wrong with the slight webbing on the feet, being a mythological creature who's to say what the should look like

I didn't notice this part of your message before. The only kind of morphs I seem to do are super extreme morphs. I always use the default uvs, because Poser doesn't yet support alt uvs, and I like to supply Studio and Poser versions of my products. The way I overcome texel stretching is to texture in a 3d painter, or to make alt uvs, texture on them, then bake the texture back out onto the original uv.

I worked on my griffin a little bit waiting for a promo to render...

One thing I've noticed about putting the dragon on the big cat mesh that will almost certainly garner criticism is this:

It's rather difficult to get long, slender toes on it, and I'm fairly certain they won't bend satisfactorily without some fierce JCMs and some posing morphs. Some webbing between the toes will be unavoidable.

Perhaps the dragon should have some conforming/geografted feet that come with it as an option?

Click to expand...

I have Blacksmith Pro so ........ hmm...... got me thinking some now about how to possibly go about this, but honestly spots and scales are some of the hardest materials to match up along seam lines. @Pendraia I might send you a PM on how to go about doing it in Daz.

Around the mouth here it's rather wonky and stretched, and then the tail portions Bottom is seamless tile top part is template mat using base UVs and that would really push your details over the top if you can get it to flow right. P.S.: Don't everyone go and get all crazy excited this is just to get the scaling as it should look.
Dragon Feet

Yeah, I figured that might be an issue with the webbing on the feet and the toes. Personally I agree a little longer toe would be nice. The dragon feet are very cat-like and have that webbing between the toes, but some dragon feet look rather similar. I'm thinking of the Larry Elmore style dragons. McFarlane dragons not so much they are more reptilian and bird like as in your griffon image. It might be offered as an add on possibly or alt foot set, but if we are going that far with it some nice talons and variation would be nice.

Ahh isn't there some model that has the bird feet you can conform to the model?
Thought I remembered seeing one over at RDNA at some point.

For that use case, I would use ZBrush to reunwrap the uvs, so that they are flat for the dragon shape. If you don't have ZBrush, you can use Blender. Blender's live unwrap function doesn't get uvs as flat as ZBrush, and it's not as automatic, but pretty good for free!

Check it for fidelity by applying to the figure as an alt uv in DAZ Studio. Sometimes alt uvs will fail if the model export altered the vertex order. If it didn't work properly, the texture on the model will look like patches of the texture are being tiled at random. Obviously, the texture won't look *right*, because it doesn't fit the new uvs. Apply your working texture and bake from the default uv to your new alt uv.

Then texture it at a very high resolution, something above the target resolution of 4096.

As a final step, bake the texture back to the original uvs using DAZ Studio.

I would like to have some elaboration on that technique Sparky as I haven't done anything like that previously.

@NapalmArsenal , I'm happy to help but much of this I've never done either so still trying to work it out. I did at one point want to try and create alternate uv's for Dawn that would use V4's textures but I had to stop as I was finding it too difficult. One day maybe I'll work it out...

It's easier than it sounds, and definitely takes less time than trying to deform texture resources manually to compensate for a wildly stretched uv map. Once I've finished my big cat skeleton promos, I will make a tutorial for you. Perhaps even a video. ^.^

Just watched it...you're really clear and concise. Great job! Is there any way blender can be used to create alternate uv's from say v4 to Dawn for personal use? I know I can't do it for distribution...